On July 15, Dr. Pope Moseley became the dean of the College of Medicine and executive vice chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. And he’s already touting some successes.
As dean, Moseley oversees the College of Medicine, the largest college at UAMS with nearly 700 students, 30 departments and more than 1,100 faculty members. Moseley replaced Dr. G. Richard Smith, who has been dean for two years.
Moseley told Arkansas Business recently that one of his early accomplishments has been the recruitment of Fred Prior, who recently was named the inaugural chairman of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the College of Medicine. Prior had been the director of the Electronic Radiology Laboratory in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He also was the principal investigator for the Cancer Imaging Archive, which is a database of cancer images.
The archive “had been at the St. Louis school, but now that Prior is here, it has been relocated … to UAMS,” Moseley said.
Moseley said one of his plans is to build UAMS’ biomedical informatics program, which is the science of understanding patterns and data.
He said that using that information will assist in the care given at UAMS.
Part of his duties as dean is working with Dr. Roxane Townsend, CEO of UAMS Medical Center, on the service line model of health care.
“In the service line model, you put the patient at the center,” Moseley said. “You focus on how best to deliver the best care … that is most satisfying to the patient and is the most efficient.”
For example, if a patient has lung cancer, all the health care workers from the surgeons to the nurses will work side-by-side under the same umbrella on the patient’s care.
Moseley said one of the reasons he left after nearly 20 years at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque was because UAMS had the service line model of health care. He had been professor and chair of the school’s Department of Internal Medicine since 2001.
He said UAMS is among the forefront nationally of academic health centers developing the service line model.
Moseley predicted that within five years most academic health centers also would use the model. “I think the old style is not going to work very long because the efficiencies that you get from doing it this way are much greater,” he said. “But it takes alignment of leadership at the top, and faculty willingness and staff willingness to take these leaps, because you’re making changes in the way people do their work.”